


What Are You Doing For The Rest of Your Life?

by PineapplePrincess



Category: Futurama
Genre: Crack, Episode Related, F/M, Humor, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 06:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2841827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PineapplePrincess/pseuds/PineapplePrincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leela tries to try new things after she and Fry return to the past...but it's a state of mind that frankly starts to creep the rest of the crew out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Are You Doing For The Rest of Your Life?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gaialux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaialux/gifts).



When she gets back to her apartment, the first thing she does is toss out the forty pairs of black pants that’ve been haunting the back of her closet since her mid-twenties. She gives a satisfied smile to the blank space leftover. She doesn’t really know what pushed her to shift everything around, what encouraged her to take that final plunge and just eliminate all of her old routines and baggage, but she’s pretty glad she did it.

Now what will she fill it with?

It’s a question that’s been poking at her ever since she and Fry returned to the present with the professor. There isn’t much she remembers about their decades-long honeymoon, sadly; the marriage is a blur of sensations and images and the strange, garbagy scent of Fry’s breath. It feels the same as it did when they married and divorced during the time skip phenomena; nothing is concrete but everything is perfectly clear in a whole different way. 

She wants him still – wants him even though she’s been told they had a whole lifetime together. Wants to wake up holding him and go to sleep listening to him shriek about giant space worms eating his brain.

But this time – somehow, someway – they’re going to do it differently than any other human being’s ever done it before them.

%%%%

“Woah! Ease up on the shredded feta, Leela!” Bender watched Leela pile the cheese onto her plate. He waved a hand before his face. “You’re overloading my scent receptors here!”

That forces Leela to stop grating and stare at her cheese-strewn salad – she really has gone overboard – just a tad but overboard none the less. “Sorry – I just thought I’d try something a little…different.” She looks up from her plate, meets the eyes of her friends as they stare at her with mild concern. “Does anyone have a problem with that?”

“Nope!” the lot of them say together. And then she hears Professor Farnsworth ask Fry for a ‘moment’. When they return to the table a moment later, Fry reaches for her hand.

“Leela, are you feeling all right?”

“Sure,” she says around a mouthful of salad. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh, well, everyone’s noticed you seem a little distracted lately. And you keep wanting to try new things – which is great! Heh, especially that thing you tried last night with that jumprope…”

“DIDN’T NEED TO KNOW THAT!” Bender yells.

“But anyway, we’re all a little worried about the way you’ve been acting since, y’know…the whole future-time-wham-a-roo thing.”

“Fry,” she says, her fork clattering to the plate, “what are you trying to tell me?”

“We all think you’re going screwy!” Bender says, giving the antithesis of a stage whisper.

“Crazy?!” she declares. “Sure, I might be a little distracted, but you don’t have to worry I’m going bananas!”

“Going bananas?! You’ve bought the whole banana farm lately!” shouts Bender.

“I’m going to go home,” she snaps. “I’ll see you at work, Fry.”

As she storms away, she hears Bender yell, “NICE ONE, FRY. Now we’ll have to hire somebody to net her!” 

%%%%

That night there’s a knock at her front door. Leela is loath to answer it – she’d settled down of the night with a bucket of Lonely Bachelorette Ice Cream and Prozac and was less than prepared for a visitor. But Fry grins at her as if she’s dressed like a princess when she sees him standing on her doorstep. 

“Whatcha want?” she asks, keeping the door locked.

“Leela, I know you’re really, really mad at me. I hate it when people get mad at me, it makes my stomach go all gross and slimy, like a televangelist’s hair.”

“That’s ironic because your worries are just like televangelists – a total myth that’s gotten way out of hand and will probably consume all of New Tokyo before it’s over.” She grumbles. “I’m fine! I just have to figure out what I’m going to be doing for the next eighty eight point five years.”

“You’re really having a hard time with what happened, aren’t you?”

Leela frowns. “I don’t like losing time, Fry. We don’t have much of it to start with. After my crappy childhood and everything I went through to get here I want to enjoy every single second of my life.”

“Yeah,” Fry says. “After losing my whole family, coming to the future and meeting you – that’s what I want too. And I don’t wanna waste any more time either...” A tear comes to her eye, and she rests her palm against the heavy wooden door.

“Leela?” he asks.

“Hmm?” 

“Could you let me in?”

She reaches for the button, opens the lock and lets him in. They end up on the couch. “So,” he says, “what do you want to do with the rest of your life?”

“See the universe,” she says, with enormous relish. “Help new, adorable animals find safety! Maybe move to the country, and take up calligraphy?”

He nods thoughtfully. “That sounds like fun.”

“And maybe, this time,” she adds. “We can have a baby. Or adopt!!! Oh Fry, I know how much it stinks being stuck in an orphanage! Wouldn’t it be fun to help out a needy kid that way?”

“Why not?! Who knows, maybe I’ll forget to strangle them!”

“I don’t think you’d strangle a kid,” she points out. His issues would be addressed on another day. “But I do think it’s getting kind of late.”

“Oh!” Fry cringes. “Yeah, I guess I’d better go back…” 

Her hand still against his forearm. “Well…maybe you could stay for a little longer?” she asks. “I’m not tired enough to sleep.”

“Okay,” he says. He gets up and gets her a cup of coffee later, and as they sip it Leela says, “Maybe we will have a baby this time. Maybe we won’t. But you know what the best thing about the future is, Fry?” 

“What?”

She smiled. “It’s not set in stone.” 

He rests his head on her shoulder after that declaration, and she pecks his cheek. “Leela?” he asks, after another pause.

“Yeah?” she wonders.

“I think I want powdered toast for breakfast this time.” He pats her hand. “For a change.”


End file.
